Virtuality and VRML: Software Studies After Manovich

A call for (and example of) material studies of software from
Matt Kirschenbaum, spurred by the Digital Arts and Culture
conference, 2000.

In 1999 I was asked to join a panel on "virtuality" convened by
the artist and media scholar Johanna Drucker at the international
Digital Arts and Culture 2000 conference in Bergen, Norway.
See http://cmc.uib.no/~dac/program.html
for the conference program. Her instructions to us were to
organize our ideas around "the ideology of the virtual" or
"virtuality and ideology." Aware that the same word ("virtuality")
had also recently been used by N. Katherine Hayles to indicate "the
cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by
information patterns," I was intrigued by the opportunity to think
about ideologies of the virtual from a materialist perspective.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How
We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and
Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
13. What would it mean to reverse the poles of Hayles's
formulation and address my own critical conviction that
digital objects are
"interpenetrated" by material
patterns (and circumstances)?

By digital objects I mean
tangible hardware devices such as processors, VDT screens, and Palm
Pilots, but also, and especially, intangible software objects such
as source code, operating systems, interface elements, and data
representations of all kinds. I use tangible and intangible to
distinguish between hardware and software because both hardware and software are material
entities. The fact that you can't reach out and touch software
(only the shrinkwrap) is incidental. (I like to call that the
haptic fallacy.) Software is the product of white papers,
engineering specs, marketing reports, conversations and
collaborations, intuitive insights and professionalized expertise,
venture capital (in other words, money), late nights (in other
words, labor), Mountain Dew, and espresso. These are material
circumstances that leave material traces - in corporate archives,
in email folders, on whiteboards and legal pads, in countless
iterations of alpha versions and beta versions and patches and
upgrades, in focus groups and user communities, in expense
accounts, in licensing agreements, in stock options and IPOs, in
carpal tunnel surgeries, and in the [former] Bay Area real estate
market (to name just a few).

At the time I was highly critical of the general lack of
historical materialist studies of new media, and the more polemical
portion of my remarks went something like the following:

New media studies, as a field, has not yet
shown that it appreciates the importance of material history. Too
often instead, there is a kind of romance of the digital that
prevails, celebrating either the medium's putative immateriality or
its putative newness and uniqueness. If the devil is in the details
then much of what has been published under the rubric of new media
studies has been positively angelic. We have numerous books on
virtual reality, but no accounts of the rise and fall of VRML, the
all-but-defunct Virtual Reality Modeling Language. Why is it that
three-dimensional graphics, a representational form well
established in both the gaming and the scientific visualization
communities, has yet to find a foothold on the Web? What does that
say about Web as an electronic environment? These are questions
that I believe are answerable, and I believe it is our
responsibility to answer them, for they have direct bearing on what
we think we know about digital art and culture today. But they are
questions that can only be answered by acknowledging that digital
objects are the product of material environments and that those
environments have histories that are or ought to be
recoverable.

That's what I said in 1999, though of course there were already
studies that did at least some of what I was calling for, Hayles's
among them. Two years later, however, Lev Manovich published
The Language of New Media, certainly
the best book I've seen on digital culture and aesthetics.
[Manovich's book is reviewed by Geniwate in
ebr.] In it, Manovich includes, among much else, a call for a
shift from media studies to something he calls software studies or
software theory. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press,
2001. For Manovich's remarks on software studies, see p. 48.
What is software studies? Manovich doesn't give us much more than
the term itself, though his book clearly stands as an extended
self-defining example. To me, software studies implies something
very close to what I was trying to get at in Bergen, the idea that
the deployment of critical terms like "virtuality" must be balanced
by a commitment to meticulous documentary research to recover and
stabilize the material traces of new media - a remembrance of
things past, but also the pre-condition for another of Manovich's
imperatives, a "theory of the present." What follows is my own
brief experiment in software studies and theories of the present, a
thumbnail narrative of the rise and fall of VRML that attempts to
answer some of the questions I have raised above.

Our story begins July 2, 1998, when unsuspecting users looking
for cosmo.sgi.com (Cosmo Software being SGI's brand name for its
emerging line of VRML products) would have encountered an error
message telling them their browsers were unable to locate the
server. Industry insiders knew that SGI was looking to divest
itself from the entire Cosmo line, and that a deal to sell Cosmo
Software to Sony had just fallen through. But to quote one observer
at the time, "even the most experienced people on the Internet can
not remember when a Fortune 500 company, with an enormous
investment in its presence on the Web, has simply turned off a
major Web site." http://www.webreference.com/3d/lesson44/.
SGI would later restore the site, claiming that its disappearance
was only coincidence, the result of an ill-timed technical glitch.
Yet days later, in the wake of the failed Sony sale, SGI pulled the
plug on Cosmo, halting all product development, transferring all
Cosmo employees to other divisions of the company, and eventually
licensing Cosmo products to a third party outfit named Platinum.
Although VRML was and is an open standard, meaning that it is not
beholden to any one company or platform, Silicon Graphics had been
its biggest industry supporter; with SGI out of the picture, VRML
would loose its best browsing software and its only dedicated
authoring tool.

VRML had had a checkered history up to this point. The first
version of the standard was introduced in May 1994, relatively
early in the Web's overall development. Originally engineered by
Mark Pesce, Gavin Bell, and Tony Parisi, VRML 1.0 was based on a
Silicon Graphics 3D object format known as Open Inventor. Although
the VRML spec itself was non-proprietary, this fact explains SGI's
early and central involvement in the VRML community. VRML allowed
for the modeling and rendering of simple 3D objects and scenes that
could be displayed by any Web browser with the appropriate plug-in.
Unlike Apple's QuickTimeVR, which is essentially a vehicle for
displaying 360° panoramas, VRML brought the capacity for true 3D
rendering to the Web. Objects were fully defined in a three
dimensional coordinate system, and users could navigate between,
behind, and around them, or else explore the infinite computational
void in which they were situated.

Skeptics have noted that the VRML community from the beginning
was infatuated with the most vulgar trappings of cyberpunk science
fiction. The standard was actively promoted as the mechanism that
would quickly transform the Web into an authentic Gibsonian
information landscape. This prejudice was written into the VRML
spec at the most literal level: VRML files, for example, were to be
called "worlds," with a.wrl suffix. But by late 1995, the VRML
community, viewed by many as the Next Big Thing, had become heavily
politicized, with a loose alliance comprising SGI, Netscape, and
Sun on the one hand, and Microsoft on the other. The VRML
Consortium, dedicated to keeping the standard open-sourced and
community-based, was caught off guard. Matters came to a head when
SGI and Microsoft each proposed rival specifications for VRML 2.0,
the successor to the original roughly defined standard. SGI
bypassed the VRML Consortium, and their spec, dubbed "Moving
Worlds" (emphasizing animation and interactive scripting) was
launched with considerable public anticipation. "Moving Worlds"
quickly became the basis for the evolving Cosmo line of products.
This was 1997 and early 1998, the heyday of VRML development. Cosmo
was generally thought to be the best browser, though Microsoft's
Worldview, built by a company named InterVista (headed up by Toni
Parisi, one of the original VRML triumvirate) was set to be
included as an integral component of Windows 98. Developers,
meanwhile, had started to realize that rather than virtual worlds
and Gibsonian cyberspaces (for which there seemed to be little
demand in the commercial sectors of the Web) the true future of
VRML lay in embedded 3D animation, including banner advertising and
the like. For a time, the VRML community enjoyed a weekly cartoon
serial starring a character dubbed "Floops." Such was the situation
in the summer of 1998 when SGI, increasingly in dire straits
financially, made the decision to sell off all of its non-essential
product lines - including by this point Cosmo.

In the wake of the failed Sony deal, Cosmo was purchased by
Platinum, a large but rather lackluster company specializing in
corporate enterprise software. People at Platinum had begun
thinking about something they called Process and Information
Visualization (business visualization, or "biz viz" for short) and
saw in VRML a way of revolutionizing the next generation of
corporate middleware. They had also, about a month beforehand,
acquired Intervista from Tony Parisi, which, with the addition of
Cosmo, effectively gave them control over the only two VRML
platforms in common use. Platinum planned to take the best features
of both and release an integrated browser and developer's tool
tailored for corporate data visualization, product visualization,
and what was nebulously called process visualization; all
compatible with standard Microsoft Office packages like PowerPoint,
Word, and Excel. So what went wrong? Platinum themselves fell on
increasingly hard times financially, and eventually sold the Cosmo
line to industry giant Computer Associates, where it remains
mothballed to this day. The VRML community, meanwhile, has moved
on, and reincarnated itself as the Web 3D Consortium, which is
currently work on a standard known as X3D, an XML-compliant schema
for describing 3D objects and scenes. See
http://www.web3d.org/x3d.html.

So that's what happened to VRML. But the question remains: why
have true 3D representational technologies yet to prove broadly
viable on the Web? This is a question that many have asked, and one
line of thinking is typified by the following remarks posted to the
VRML developer's list:

Take a look at HTML [and Java]. None of
[their] problems are stopping people from developing Web sites.
Why? Because they perceive a need for the kind of content that they
can create with these technologies. The perceived need is so strong
that they workaround all the problems. We need content that
demonstrates convincingly why 3D and VRML is useful and necessary
to the masses. http://www.web3d.org/www-vrml/hypermail/1998/9807/0466.html.

Content may be king, as they like to say on Bloomberg and MSNBC,
but I think part of what my brief narrative of VRML reveals is the
extent to which this line of thinking slips too easily into a kind
of false consciousness. Apple's QuickTimeVR, for example, has built
a dedicated following, and the true heir to the kind of dynamic
animation once promised by VRML is to be found in Macromedia's
Flash product. Flash is currently being used for both games and
visualization on the Web, but especially for splash screens and the
kind of animated vignettes and shorts anticipated by the Floops
character. Tracking the extent to which the rise of Flash parallels
the fall of VRML is an exercise for a longer essay, but one of the
reasons why Flash is flourishing is that it has overcome many of
the problems that afflicted VRML, notably browser distribution (the
Flash player is a standard installation option for both Netscape
and Internet Explorer) and cross-platform compatibility. This
immediately restores us to the eminently material world of data
standards, licensing and distribution agreements, marketing
strategies, and so forth. The salient question is not whether one
can produce "better" content with VRML or with Flash, but rather
the extent to which the kind of content we create for environments
like the Web is determined by various social histories, histories
that are often corporate, but always situated within absolute zones of
material and ideological circumstance.

What is software studies then? Software studies is what media
theory becomes after the bubble bursts. Software studies is
whiteboards and white papers, business plans and IPOs and
penny-stocks. Software studies is PowerPoint vaporware and proofs
of concept binaries locked in time-stamped limbo on a server where
all the user accounts but root have been disabled and the domain
name is eighteen months expired. Software studies is, or can be,
the work of fashioning documentary methods for recognizing and
recovering digital histories, and the cultivation of the critical
discipline to parse those histories against the material matrix of
the present. Software studies is understanding that digital objects
are sometimes lost, yes, but mostly, and more often, just
forgotten. Software studies is about adding more memory.